Sunday, October 21, 2012

Pretty Weighted Blanket

Writing about Claire's sleep issues motivated me to make ask my mom to make her a weighted blanket. She was in town yesterday for my little brother's football game, go tigers, so after the game and lunch we sent the none napping kids out with the dads and got to work. The blanket was done by dinner, not bad.

Tools like weighted blankets and vests help calm children with sensory issues. She has tried a weighted vest at school during the times she struggles to focus but it wasn't the thing for her. However, we do know a lot of children who the weighted vest has been a total life saver for and you can watch the kids settle down as soon as they feel it on them.

A lot of the examples online used rice or beans but I was having vision of pee soaked rice and thought we could come up with something washable, thus the plastic stuffing beads.

The hardest park of this project for me (not Mom) was the math. The internet says that a weighted blanket should be 1/10th the child's body weight plus 1 pound. So for 38 pound Claire her blanket should be about 5 pounds.

38 divided by10 = 3.8 + 1 = 4.8

The squares looked good at about 4"x 4" and our blanket was 59"x 42" so we ended up with 120 5"x 4" squares. Then we had to work out how much weight goes into each square by Teaspoons because I don't have a small scale. We came up with .7 oz in each square and that ended up being 2 1/2 Tablespoons.

Now I would like to thank my favorite math teacher of all time Mrs. Boland; couldn't have done it without you and algebra 1 (I couldn't remember the last time I had to use an X).

1. place the fabric right sides facing each other, like you are making a giant pillow case pin and sow three sides.

2. Turn right side out and iron flat.

3. Sow around the three sides leaving the one side open.

3. Cut a 4" template to keep your line straight. Sow lines 4" apart down the blanket creating long pockets to put the beads into.

4. We had 8 rows so I preset the beads in cups to just dump them in, 2 1/2 Tbsp in each cup and shake down to the bottom.

5. Next we made a 5" template to sow the other direction, closing off the pockets at 4"x 5" and repeat steps 4 and 5, 15 times.

6. Fold down and fold again the end to close off the last row and sow.

Thank you Grammy!!! We had some friends over last night and the children were passing around the new blanket, everyone loves it. Claire was up in once last night and up at 6:30 this morning which is batter and an hour later then normal and close to regular wake up time. However, I did put her to bed an hour late because of the company. We will see...